Antonio Santi Giuseppe Meucci was born in Florence in 1808. By the age of 13 he was the youngest student at the Florence Academy of Fine Arts to take up mechanical and chemical engineering. When he started a part-time job as a stage technician at the Teatro della Pergola, Meucci designed an acoustic telephone to be able to communicate between the control room and the stage.
By 1835, Meucci immigrated to the Americas, stopping first in Cuba, then a Spanish province. In Havana, he constructed a system for water purification and reconstructed the Gran Teatro. In 1850, he finally arrived in Staten Island where he would live for the rest of life.
Just four years later, he invented the telephone apparatus, communicating between the different floors of his apartment building.
Although Alexander Graham Bell was first credited as the inventor of the telephone, in 2002, Resolution 269 by the United States Congress officially recognized Meucci as the "first inventor" of the telephone.
